I’ll let you read the article for what he says on Retention, but I want to touch on this particular part:

unless you’re tracking those numbers (retention) as a trend over the life of your school, from month to month and from year to year, you really haven’t unlocked the full benefit of knowing that number on a monthly basis

And this part quoting Peter Drucker:

“What gets measured gets managed.”

MasterVision can help you increase your retention (and I’ll talk about that in the coming days), but it will also let you instantly measure retention. Mike says this might take you 10 minutes a day. With MasterVision, it’ll take you 10 seconds.

Go into Tools > Reporting from the menu. Select the Retention category and then “Attrition Rate Over Time” report. This report shows you how many active students you had in a date range, how many active students you had at the end of that date range, and then the percentage of students that had dropped out (the attrition rate – how many students you lost).

It also shows you who those students were that dropped out and their last rank. This might give you a hint on where to focus your efforts to decrease your attrition (or increase your retention, however you like to think about it). For example, if you notice that a lot of folks are quitting at a certain belt level, you may want to look at what is happening at that level. If a lot of students are dropping out because their contract expired and they opted not to renew, you may want to look at your renewal process.

This report is asking for a date range that you want to look at. You’ll want to decide on a range (I’d suggest six months or 12 months). I’d then run this report every month, on the same day, for that same amount of time. As you work to improve your retention, check the report to see if your rate is going down.

Lastly, you can run this report for previous date ranges. If you haven’t been paying attention to your retention rate, go in and run this report now for the last 12 months ending November 1st, and then 12 months ending October 1st, and then 12 month ending September 1st. This will let you see what the trend is for your retention rate.

An example of this report is below. The help file page that explains this report is here.